Patrick Lee - The Breach

Travis watched her eyes; she was looking down now, looking everywhere but at him.

"You're welcome," he said, so quietly that for a moment he wondered if she'd heard it.

She looked up at him. There was something in her eyes he hadn't seen there before. Something vulnerable. The last pair of eyes to look at him like that had been Emily Price's.

Not a bad final moment, if this was it.

Holding Paige's gaze, he turned the knob and shoved the door open hard.

They didn't die.

In the darkness beyond the doorway, more wires and circuit boards hung like vines, though not as densely as they did throughout the lower floors. Only a few here. Travis could see them silhouetted against a dim orange glow from somewhere ahead. Like the light of embers, but constant.

A sound began to radiate from the room. A droning hum, so deep it was barely audible. He could feel it more than hear it.

He pocketed the PDA and unslung the rifle from his shoulder. He stepped through the opening, Paige just behind him. The way ahead was hard to see; the orange glow barely helped. He moved toward what he thought was its source, though he couldn't actually see it yet. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the room around him was vast. It was all the remaining space of the ninth floor, wide open and uninterrupted.

The hum was coming from somewhere ahead, the same direction as the light source.

Twenty feet in from the doorway, Travis saw something on the floor ahead, maybe an obstacle to step over, maybe a strewn bunch of wire. A few steps later he saw that it was neither. It was another inscription written in the scratch language, carved right into the floorboards. This one had the note-to-self simplicity Travis had found lacking in the previous five.

It read, TAGS ARE ESTABLISHED WHEN THIS ROOM IS OPENED.

He translated it aloud for Paige. She stiffened.

"Tagging," she said. "The Ares."

Travis thought of the video she'd shown him. The orange cube tagging the man in the cage, making him the target for the rage it incited in those around him.

He looked at the orange light ahead; there was no question as to its source now, even if he couldn't see it yet.

"It tagged us when we opened the door," he said. "I thought you had to be within a couple feet of it."

Understanding came to him even as he finished the line. He saw it come to Paige as well.

"Amplified," she said. "The distances are amplified."

Travis stared at the light source and guessed that they were at least fifty feet shy of it.

"If it can tag us this far away," he said, "how far can it reach to turn people against us?"

He saw the implication saturate her expression, saw her whole body react to it as if a ghost had traced its fingers up her spine. They were standing atop a nine-story building filled with armed, trained killers. If even those on the nearest floor were affected "Oh my God," she whispered. She steadied her microphone beside her mouth, caught her breath and said, "All teams, get out of the building, right now. Run."

But even she had to know it was too late. In the darkness around them, the LED indicators on the hanging circuit boards began flashing a manic rhythm. The trap was already springing. A second later, the orange light ahead of them flared bright, just as it had done in the video. Then brighter. So much brighter it lit the room, revealed it as daylight would have. A basketball-court-sized space, mostly empty, strung with spiderwebs of circuitry here and there.

Travis grabbed her arm, spun her toward the double doors and the landing beyond, and sprinted, dragging her until she caught her balance and ran with him.

"Where are we going?" Paige said.

"The eighth floor windows over the river. I hope you can swim."

"Are you fucking insane?"

"Insane problem, insane solution."

They passed through the doorframe, sidestepped the nuke and took the stairs two at a time, slowing only as they reached the tangle of wires halfway down the flight.

Just below them, the stairwell thundered with running footsteps. But were the footsteps going down, or coming up? There wasn't time to judge it.

Travis reached the bottom of the flight, Paige just a step behind him. Tunnels among the wiring branched in five directions; he didn't know which one led to the river overlook. Paige did. She took the lead, and he followed, close, stooping in the low passageway. The pounding on the steps still gave no clue as to its direction.

They'd gone thirty feet through the tunnel when a voice spoke in their ears.

"This is Haslett. I just got outside the main exit. I think we better get everyone back to their positions."

Paige stopped. Travis pulled up just short of crashing into her. Behind him, the clamor of footsteps on the stairs went silent.

Paige steadied herself and spoke. "Status, all report. Are you guys affected or not?"

A jumble of calm responses came back over the line, the comm system cutting out most of them. But Travis heard enough to know they were fine. Paige turned in the tunnel, faced him, looking as confused as he felt.

"Maybe it didn't reach far enough," she said.

Haslett responded. "No, I think it reached too far. I think it just tagged us as targets, the same as you."

"What are you talking about?" Paige said.

"Look out the window," Haslett said. "All teams back to positions, right now. Sorry to countermand you, Miss Campbell."

The footsteps resumed on the stairs, definitely coming upward now.

Paige met Travis's eyes a moment longer, then turned and covered the last forty feet to the nearest set of windows, at an open corner looking out over the river in one direction and the city in another. Over her shoulder, Travis saw what was happening even as he stopped.

Paige said nothing. There was no expression for it.

In every building they could see, the dim glow of flashlights had vanished from the windows. That was because the flashlights were coming out through the street-level exits now, their beams stabbing wildly through the fog as their owners ran. Ran toward 7 Theaterstrasse. Travis's eyes trailed up along the river, and he saw the same thing happening, block after block, as far as he could see. All the way to E41, two miles away, where every pair of headlights had just swung off onto the surface streets, and were coming this way at full speed.

Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Chase strains at the binds any longer. Both appear resigned to what is going to happen to them, and Travis hates them all the more for it. He wants them to be afraid, as he knows Emily must have been before she died.

The mad blue and red pulses of police flashers rim the plantation shutters. They've made no move to come in yet. A bullhorn has been chattering on and off for the past ten minutes, and three times the phone has rung for thirty seconds or more, but Travis has paid no attention.

Neither has he spoken to his parents.

It is this simple: he wants them to sit here waiting to die.

He wants them to feel what Emily felt, and he wants them to feel it for as long as possible before he kills them. The last thing they will ever hear will be the footsteps of the SWAT team on the stone floor of the hallway. It's likely that this will also be the last thing Travis hears, and that's fine. If he survives to spend the rest of his life in prison, that will also be fine, because he's earned it. Either way, all the justice Emily can ever be given will be spun in this room in the next quarter of an hour.

She deserves more, of course. She deserves to be alive, and lovely, twenty-four years old, with a future full of the simple things she wanted: a house, kids, a couple cats lying around in sunbeams on the living-room carpet. Revenge is a pale and sickly substitute for those things, but it's all Travis has left to give her, so he means to give it.